Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Being human

To feel.  To be understood.  To be heard.

To keep striving.  To have patience.  To be still.

Dance to the rhythm of our life.  Lay on my back while the soft current does its work.

Peacefully accept who you are and what that means.

I write this while my mind goes a million miles an hour.  Some days are like that for me.  I have difficulty focusing and want to read - yes, yes, yes!  Or converse...  I want to hear people's truths or speak my own.  I want to flush out.   What I've come to learn is that's part of my humanness.  I work in cycles.  I have days when my thoughts seem to rush, overflowing.  I have days where I am drawn to silence.

It's not judgement, it's simply awareness.  Simple. Simply. Always. Awareness.

"We see how beautiful and wonderful and amazing things are, and we see how caught up we are. It isn’t that one is the bad part and one is the good part, but that it’s a kind of interesting, smelly, rich, fertile mess of stuff. When it’s all mixed up together, it’s us: humanness.
This is what we are here to see for ourselves. Both the brilliance and the suffering are here all the time; they interpenetrate each other. For a fully enlightened being, the difference between what is neurosis and what is wisdom is very hard to perceive, because somehow the energy underlying both of them is the same. The basic creative energy of life … bubbles up and courses through all of existence. It can be experienced as open, free, unburdened, full of possibility, energizing. Or this very same energy can be experienced as petty, narrow, stuck, caught… The basic point of it all is just to learn to be extremely honest and also wholehearted about what exists in your mind — thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, the whole thing that adds up to what we call “me” or “I.” Nobody else can really begin to sort out for you what to accept and what to reject in terms of what wakes you up and what makes you fall asleep. No one else can really sort out for you what to accept — what opens up your world — and what to reject — what seems to keep you going round and round in some kind of repetitive misery.
This is the process of making friends with ourselves and with our world. It involves not just the parts we like, but the whole picture, because it all has a lot to teach us." - Pema Chodrom